Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)

The undercover journalist Patryk Szczepaniak tells very excitingly how he prepared for his role as “butchers” for a slaughterhouse in Poland. The results of his investigative work were sensational. https://gijn.org/2019/08/05/becoming-a-butcher-lessons-from-working-undercover/

His report follows:

“In early October 2018, Tomasz Patora and I started to take a closer look into the Polish cattle industry. We had a tip-off: A slaughterhouse (or abattoir) in Poland was selling the meat of sick cattle, some of which had arrived at the facility already dead. After conducting some initial background research and sneaking around the slaughterhouse a few times in the cover of night, we knew our source was telling the truth. The only problem was how we were going to get inside to prove it. After a long discussion with our editor at the investigative program Superwizjer of TVN Discovery Poland, we decided that one of us needed to go undercover and get hired as a butcher.

Happily, I got the job.

 Patryk Szczepaniak went undercover to investigate a slaughterhouse in Warsaw, where he secretly recorded video. Image: Courtesy TVN Discovery Poland

We also knew that the slaughterhouse would take in diseased, dead cows for free. We knew that sometimes the sick cows had broken legs, or that their bones wouldn’t pop back in their hips after giving birth.

We also knew that after those sick cows were slaughtered, the carcasses were cleaned and visible marks of diseases were cut away, and that the meat of those sick cows were regularly sold on for human consumption. And we knew that all of this was done without any oversight by the state’s veterinary office.

We estimated that by killing around 20 sick cows per day, the slaughterhouse would earn around $660,000 of pure profit per year; if it killed only the healthy ones, its profits would come in at around $91,000 per year.

Poland produced almost 438,000 tons of bovine meat worth $1.5 million in 2018, and more than 80% of that was exported to European Union and beyond.

Before going to the slaughterhouse and asking for the job, I prepared two stories and, based on how the situation inside developed, I could choose two different paths to explain how I ended up at a slaughterhouse in the countryside, far away from major cities.

During the job interview, I began to sense that my initial story paths wouldn’t work, so I had to come up with a third story path. So I said my girlfriend had fallen pregnant by another man, which left me distraught and far away from home.

I know it sounds really cliched, but that’s the one that landed me the job.

Change of personality. Adapt to your environment. If it is an academic environment, behave and speak like an academic. If it’s a slaughterhouse, behave and speak like a butcher”.

I worked undercover for almost three weeks in November 2018 to expose the slaughterhouse.

Image: Courtesy TVN Discovery Poland

I managed to document and film the pulling, by a rope, of sick and dead cows into the slaughterhouse; the preparation and cleaning of the sick and dead cows for further sale; the slaughter of cows in advanced stages of pregnancy; the disposal of both small and large fetuses; a wide range of animal cruelty acts; the loading of rotting carcasses into trucks for further sale; stamping by workers, my boss, and myself with an official veterinary stamp that was intended to show that the meat was examined by the veterinary service when it was not; and conversations with workers and the head of the company about procedure.

Altogether we had around 120 hours of undercover footage”.

For more…at: https://worldanimalsvoice.com/2019/08/15/undercover-in-poland-becoming-a-butcher/

My comment:  And we immediately remember the German scandal, which has the same criminal barbarity against sick and injured cows here, in “civilized” Germany.

Image: SOKO Tierschutz e.V, Germany

The SOKO Organization also got acquainted with undercover video material, we had reported it . https://worldanimalsvoice.com/2019/04/13/germany-crime-continues-in-slaughterhouses/

That was in March and April 2019, and that was the tenth slaughterhouse scandal in Germany within two years.

Connected to this is a criminal network of hundreds of farmers, livestock dealers and veterinarians who operate and support the illegal and highly profitable trade in so-called downer cows.

A farmer who was confronted with pictures of his farm said without any sense of guilt:

“It is not an isolated case that animals are so charged when they can no longer walk independently. That’s just like that. That’s economy. We do business. “

Our Agriculture Minister of Germany, Julia Klöckner said: We do not need a self-proclaimed stable police, which controls the compliance with animal welfare. It is up to the state to prosecute farmers who keep their animals bad “.

Klöckner announced that the federal government wanted to punish stabling burglaries even more in this legislative period. So far, activists often go unpunished, gaining access to stables and secretly filming. Farmers criticize this.

Klöckner: “The thing is very clear: burglary is burglary. Animal rights activists would have to abide by laws”.

No thing is clear in slaughterhouses before a brave undercover team goes in and films what corrupt politicians consider as “clear”.

Thanks to these people, we know how every system, and not just that of Poland, works with the meat mafia.

The walls of slaughterhouses have long been made of glass, but no one wants to know what’s going on in there.

My best regards to all, Venus

Filed under: GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional | Tagged: animal welfare, butcher, Julia Klöckner, livestock dealer, Poland, pregnant cows, sick cows, slaughterhouse in Poland, Superwizjer, undercover footage | 1 Comment »